One of the really cool effects of Brian Holinka hitting the Twittersphere (and, well, being hired in the first place) is that we suddenly have more active back-and-forth between WoW gamers and designers than we’ve ever had on PvP matters.

This recent exchange with a couple of tweeting rogues provides a little insight from the design side about why Combat PvP viability is such a challenge. (I’ll provide some analysis below the thread.)

@holinka Asking it many times actually, never got an answer...do you even care about combat rogue in PvP? Killing Spree must not jump target

Now, this isn’t to say that Combat PvP is subpar entirely because of our inability to “focus” Killing Spree on a single target; other factors, such as Bandit’s Guile cycles (which are very hard to plan around in PvP), also play a role.

But a Combat rogue’s ability to put on offensive pressure is balanced around PvE raiding situations, where we’ll usually have lots of time within melee range of on our target, don’t have to target swap that often, can use all of our cooldowns more or less as they become available, and can use Restless Blades to reduce those cooldowns very effectively. In most PvP situations, uptime is a challenge, target-swapping is the norm, and it’s very hard to optimize cooldowns.

This is one big reason why Subtlety tends to surpass the other two specs for PvP, particularly now that most of rogues’ utility/mobility-related abilities (Shadowstep, Preparation) are available equally to all three specs.

Lemme explain (and hopefully not screw this up): Subtlety’s main burst-damage window comes during Shadow Dance, a short-duration cooldown we can use every minute. By comparison, Assassination (Vendetta) and Combat (Killing Spree, Adrenaline Rush) have longer durations and longer cooldowns — which, given how hard it can be in PvP to stay within melee range of your target for 15 to 20 seconds while they’re active, means much of their benefit often gets lost.

Which brings us to Killing Spree. To use it at max effectiveness, we need to use it while in Deep Insight (which generally takes much longer to reach in PvP than in PvE) — and when we use it in PvP, we’re often going to want to do so against a single target, which now that the range has been increased to 8 yards (Holinka’s reference to 10 yards in the tweet above is probably just a brain fart) is harder than ever.

Many rogue players have long wished for some type of glyph that would make KS focus on only your current target. I don’t know PvP well enough to have a sense for whether that’s a balanced solution. One other thought would be to make each KS opportunity less of a deal-breaker, perhaps by cutting its cooldown down to a minute and reducing the number of attacks it deals from 7 to 3. But that would make for a pretty weak cooldown, and it still wouldn’t resolve any issues with Adrenaline Rush.

What’s your magic solution for making Combat rogues desirable in PvP? Or is the situation actually not remotely as bad as many in various WoW forums claim? That last tweet from Holinka, for instance, suggests that people who can play Combat consistently (well) in PvP may be able to see a good deal of success.